Grief, Horror Sweep Nightclub Survivors

MEGAN REICHGOTT

Published 7:00 pm, Monday, February 17, 2003

Associated Press Writer

More than a day after the crushing madness inside a Chicago nightclub, Aurelio Kidd couldn't believe all he could do to help was feed the victims slivers of ice, hold their hands and watch some of them die.

"They were screaming for their lives, 'Help me, I don't want to die like this, help me,'" Kidd said Tuesday from his home in Gary, Ind., sounding weary and dazed by what he saw at the E2 nightclub early Monday.

Twenty-one people were killed and more than 50 others were injured in the rush to get out after someone used pepper spray inside the club.

The dead, ranging in age from 19 to 43, were remembered as friends and hard workers. One was a hairdresser, one worked as a hospital security guard and another hoped to someday become a nurse. At least a dozen were parents.

As authorities tried to figure out who was to blame for the tragedy and an attorney filed the first of what promises to be scores of lawsuits, Kidd and others who were there struggled with their emotions.

Kidd, 22, said he has barely been able to sleep: Every time he closes his eyes he thinks about the people to whom he'd yelled to squeeze his hand "to just let me know they are living."

Then those memories are pushed aside by images of those who never responded _ the pregnant woman he picked up who was dead and two others who died shortly after he got to them.

"I think about all the people passing out," he said. "The fella whose face was crushed, who when I picked him up he urinated on himself so I knew he was dead."

Jamarr Hayes, 22, remembers falling and being buried by people not far from the club's exit. As he rested at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Hayes said he knew he was being smothered.

Chiquita Rhodes doesn't have the same vivid images in her head. But the 24-year-old Chicago woman has been to the club and has walked the long, steep stairwell where her 19-year-old sister, Charita, died.

"I imagine her falling down those stairs, of not being able to hold onto that rail," she said.

Like Kidd, Rhodes said neither she nor her family has found any answers to explain what happened.

"We are still very, very confused," she said. "You don't start blaming anybody at this time, you don't start doing none of that, you're just trying to cope."

For Rhodes, Tuesday was more difficult than Monday, when she raced from hospital to hospital until she pushed herself to go to the one place she didn't want to find her sister: the morgue.

"It's harder the second day because the reality has set in," she said. "You wake up in the morning and you expect to see them (loved ones) and you don't. Then you know it's real."

As she gathered with her family, Rhodes remembered her only kid sister as "a good kid who wanted to be a nurse, (who) had big dreams."

Others turned to church "to be consoled, to get a grasp or understanding and to seek answers," said Larry Hampton, a minister who attended a prayer service with about 100 other people at Sweet Holy Spirit Church on the city's South Side.

D.I. Christian McGhee found support at the service. And he found a place to talk about his cousin, 21-year-old Ezalle Rogers, who died before she could pursue her dream of going to college and left behind a 3-year-old daughter.

"We don't know what to think," he said. "It's just a big question mark what happened."